topocare x IOTA — Status Report 01
What the PoC is about
IOTA enables the way for a machine economy. In a perfect machine economy machine-to-machine payments are possible. This will become more and more important when the number of autonomous machines and vehicles working together increase. Which steps have to be realized to reach this goal?
Let’s take a look on production: Nowadays machine shops are organized along the needs of production flow. Lean production techniques focus on the reduction of waste and concentrate the process on value adding. But the value added and the costs of each operation are still not really transparent. The reason is that financial accounting and machine operations are usually devided.
To realize true machine-to-machine payments, all production steps need to be able to charge a certain amount of money.
Pay-on-Production / Pay-per-Use Business models
Recent developments in payment and business models for machines which are used for production can be an important milestone for reaching a machine economy. These models are called Pay-on-Production (PoP) or Pay-per-Use. In these business models every production step will be charged to the customer.
In the domain of manufacturing but also for medical equipment these models are already successfully introduced into the market and will certainly become more popular. Usually the machine producer installs the machine at the client’s site and than charges per use. Reasons for this model from a client’s perspective are a lower upfront capital investment and that the people who actually developed and produced the machine will keep an eye on maintenance and equipment optimization.
The following link gives an example of a PoP model for compressed air.
By realizing these models the basic requirements for a machine economy, where machines pay machines, are fulfilled. Hence an efficient payment model has to be found, which enables the machine itself to charge for every piece of production.
Pay-on-Production realized with IOTA
Current PoP models are realized with the machine counting the number of pieces produced. The customer will be charged on this basis at the end of the month in the agreed currency.
In our eyes IOTA delivers exactly the right characteristics to improve this model: micro payments, data integrity and no transaction costs.
Our aim is to create a true Pay-on-Production model, where payments are done for every production step. In order to achieve this we will use our own machines, which will be described below.
